"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis

18.6.04

LINK: Another snarky post from Crooked Timber, this time glazing over one of the more serious problems of utilitarianism by quining away (man, have I waited a long time to use that word in context) the lack of in-every-case moral direction by pretending that outrageous counterfactuals shouldn't be taken seriously. Maybe. Or maybe you can construct plausible still troubling counterfactuals, and people just choose these because the underlying problem is more pronounced there.